Proceedings of the Second Resilience Engineering Symposium (2006)

Argumentaire

The term resilience has appeared with increasing frequency in recent years, often in the aftermath of the major man-made or natural upheavals that have affected societies and organisations. Resilience has been used to describe how people manage to go on living and working despite acts of terror or natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis), to explain how the economy of some countries seem to defy 'common sense', and even to describe the skill of some politicians to withstand the 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.'

More importantly, the term resilience engineering has also been used to characterise a new way of thinking about safety. Whereas the conventional approaches to system safety are dominated by hindsight and emphasise error tabulation and probabilistic risk management, Resilience Engineering looks for ways to enhance an organisation's ability to create processes that are robust as well as flexible, to monitor and revise risk models, and to target resources proactively in the face of ongoing production and economic pressures.